Monday, November 04, 2013

Legal battle for archive won't be easy

Highlights of the archive on display in Washington: From Top: Babylonian Talmud; book of Psalms; Child's primer; School leaving certificate (Photos: Edna Shohet)

The story of the Jewish archive is a way of drawing attention to the forced exodus of Iraqi Jews. Winning a legal battle to stop the archive's return to Iraq won't be easy, say experts, but the hurdles are not insurmountable. Nathan Guttman gives a good overview of the issue in The Forward:Washington — At the National Archives
in Washington, the story of Iraq’s ancient Jewish community has just
gone on display, presented via a priceless collection of artifacts and
documents recovered during America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. But behind
the scenes, a battle reaching to the highest levels of government is
taking place over the future of those same documents and artifacts.

“Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish
Heritage” is the subject of a vigorous campaign launched by Iraqi Jewish
activists, Jewish communal leaders and members of Congress trying to
convince the government of the United States to back out of an agreement
it signed with the Iraqi government, promising to return these objects
after the exhibit ends.

At issue is not just the fate of the religious
artifacts and community documents, which were forcefully seized by the
regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before American GIs ever
arrived. With these items, surviving members of Iraq’s once thriving but
now extinct Jewish community are also seeking to win recognition from
the world for their story, a story they believe other Jews take for
granted.

“I believe this is an opportunity to make people aware
of how Iraqi Jews were forced to leave the country [and] under what
circumstances that happened,” said Carole Basri, a lawyer, filmmaker and
Iraqi community activist.

The documents now on display in Washington include
papers from the Jewish school Basri’s grandfather founded in Baghdad
following the 1941 farhoud, a pogrom against the city’s Jewish
community. Basri faults the U.S. government, which rescued these
documents and other papers and Jewish scriptures from the basement of
the Iraqi secret police after Saddam’s ouster, for rushing to sign an
agreement without consulting with members of the Iraqi Jewish Diaspora.
Now this Diaspora wants its voice heard in the belated debate over the
agreement.
The tale of the Iraqi Jewish archive dates back to 2003, weeks after Saddam’s fall. (...)

Jewish organizations have long been
concerned about artifacts belonging to extinct communities. Members of
the Iraqi Diaspora look at looted Jewish property and art from the Nazi
era as an example of goods taken unlawfully that have been returned to
their owners. Other cases are more complex. They include the
Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s bid for ownership of 40,000 books and
manuscripts collected by Rabbi Joseph Schneerson, the Hasidic group’s
sixth grand rabbi, that are now held by Russia, and the claim by the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for a historic Yiddish book library
in Lithuania.

Winning a legal battle for keeping the Iraqi Jewish
archives in America won’t be easy, international lawyer Allan Gerson
said. He explained that a U.S. court will not agree to judge the
legality of actions taken by the Iraqi regime that seized the archives.
The fact that the U.S. government signed an agreement promising to
return them makes things even harder, he said. But he added that these
obstacles “are not insurmountable.”

Still, given their daunting legal odds, activists
pushing to keep the artifacts here are trying to avoid taking the case
to court. Rhode suggested making the digital images of the artifacts
available online and open to the Iraqi government, while leaving the
objects in the United States. Basri said she supports setting up a
commission to locate owners of the objects while signing a long-term
loan agreement with the Iraqis.

The State Department, on the other hand, believes it
can satisfy all sides by adhering to the agreement and ensuring that the
collection is treated with care when returned to Iraq. To this end, the
department is bringing Iraqi conservation specialists to learn from
National Archives experts.

The battle over the archives’ fate could lead to a
broader examination of Iraqi Jewish property. Activists and Jewish
groups have pointed to a locked storage room in the Iraqi historical
museum that contains, according to estimates, some 500 Torah scrolls. In
Iraqi Jewish tradition, individuals in the community who had their
names embroidered on the Torah covers owned the scrolls. This, members
of the community believe, could make locating the owners possible, if
and when access to the scrolls is allowed.

5 comments:

And today on BBC television it was announced that a very large number of paintings by the great masters have been found in Germany. These paintings belonged to Jews who were taken away to concentration camps.Will they be given back to the families of these Jews? We shall see.So it is with the artifacts stolen from the Iraqi Jews.Remember this saying: if ou want a thing well done, do it yourself!sultana

The outcome depends on political decisions most likely. And in this case, the State Dept & obama White House are against the Jews instinctively and traditionally. The white House & State House have to be named and shamed.

The school records of Edwin Shaul Shukur and Olivia Joseph Jacobs are on display.

At the beginning of exhibit, there is a collage-like assembly of paper scraps. Standing out is a book with a yellow cover with a title in Arabic related to "Israel's strategy in the Middle East." Perhaps some of the archive is from sources other than the Jewish community.

The displays have bilingual Arabic MSA and English text, and the Arabic uses the Hebrew names for the prophets, which may not be as familiar to readers as are their Iraqi aliases.

The exhibit is bound to draw much positive attention to the Jewish world when it travels to Iraq.

speaking of the return of the paintings stolen by the Nazis, the German customs police knew about this trove of paintings for almost 3 years, since early 2011. Yet the owners and heirs, such as the very prominent Anne Sinclair, were not notified till this past Sunday by the weekly Focus. So it appears.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)